level up your seo with video game tactics
I recently watched Mark Williams-Cook’s talk, Improve your SEO with video games and exploits, at brightonSEO 2025.
The talk opens with him explaining how when he first played an online multiplayer game and found himself losing constantly – despite using the same tactics that the game taught him in single player mode.
The issue was that when playing the solo campaign, he was playing the game as the designers intended – doing things ‘correctly’ and following the established ‘rules’.
When he left the carefully structured and choreographed single player mode and tried using the same strategy against real human competitors, those rules didn’t apply.
In the unshackled multiplayer games, players were uncovering and exploiting every possible advantage they could – so anyone trying to play conventionally was defeated easily.
what’s this got to do with seo?
Mark likens this to learning SEO in theory vs how it operates in the real world. When you initially start diving into SEO, you’ll learn about the usual stuff: internal linking, headings, keywords and you feel like it’s straightforward.
But even after you’ve done everything our Google overlords ask, you’re still buried in the SERPs beneath your competitors. Whatever they’re doing, it’s something that isn’t necessarily against the rules, but also isn’t written anywhere in the ‘official’ instructions.
This is where Mark mentions the concept of the meta (or metagame) in gaming. You might have also heard it referred to as ‘game beyond the game’. Simply put, the meta is the optimal way players find to win – this might involve selecting a particular character, choosing certain items, or adopting a proven, dominant strategy.
It’s become common to suggest that META stands for Most Effective Tactic Available. While this is a good way to explain the concept, it was never originally an acronym (which actually makes this a backronym).
In competitive multiplayer games, players often gravitate towards the meta. This often results in a significant proportion of the player base all doing the same thing. Players unaware of the meta, who are simply trying to play the game as intended, struggle to gain any ground against these ‘metagamers’.
The Cycle of Change
The game creators typically make adjustments to rebalance the game in response to this dominance. They often weaken the potency (‘nerf’) of certain items or characters. Alternatively, with so many players using the same strategy, the community may unearth a new meta designed to counter the current one.
The meta doesn’t ever go away in either case; it simply has to change again and again. Mark likened this phenomenon to when SEO practitioners find something that works for manipulating Google’s algorithm. If an advantage exists in SEO, people will certainly exploit it to its fullest.
Google will eventually correct this. It regularly rolls out core updates to its algorithm. These updates not only reduce or ‘nerf’ the effectiveness of these exploits but often penalise the worst offenders.
Relating Concepts
As a video game enthusiast, the metaphor really resonated with me. The gaming comparison helped me easily relate to and understand the SEO concept. It reminded me that the best way to explain an idea is often to relate it to something the audience already understands. I’ve made a mental note to try this whenever I’m explaining a complex or technical SEO premise to a colleague or client.
I also looked into the origins of the term ‘nerfed’. Apparently, it came from a time when a video game designer reduced the effectiveness of swords in their game. Players complained it was like using a ‘nerf sword’, referencing the popular brand of toy foam swords. You could go down an even deeper rabbit hole wondering how NERF got its name, but I’ll spare you that tangent for now.